The Island of Doctor Moreau Summary: Wells's Story of Science Without Limits
What The Island of Doctor Moreau is about
H. G. Wells published The Island of Doctor Moreau on 1 January 1896. It is a short science fiction horror novel, set between 1 February 1887 and 5 January 1888, and told as the first person narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man picked up by a passing boat. Wells himself called it "an exercise in youthful blasphemy". That phrase is a useful warning. The book is less interested in gadgets than in asking what a human being actually is, and whether anything stops a clever man from making one.
The question it keeps returning to is moral rather than technical. Moreau can do what he does. Nobody on the island can tell him not to. The horror comes from watching what fills the space where a conscience should be.
The story in brief
Prendick is a young scientist from Victorian England. His boat, the Lady Vain, goes down in the southern Pacific. A ship called the Ipecacuanha takes him aboard, where a man named Montgomery revives him. Montgomery has an odd, bestial servant called M'ling, and the ship carries a cargo of animals belonging to Montgomery's employer, including a puma.
At the island the captain throws Prendick off the ship and sails away, leaving him in a dinghy. Montgomery takes pity and brings him ashore, though he makes clear that Prendick cannot be a guest. He is housed in an outer room of an enclosed compound. Prendick slowly works out whose island this is. Moreau was once an eminent physiologist in London, until a journalist exposed his experiments in vivisection and he fled the country.
Moreau sets to work on the puma. The cries from the operating room drive Prendick out into the jungle, where he meets people who look unmistakably like swine, and is chased by something that is neither animal nor man. Questioned, Montgomery will not explain. Prendick, finding the operating room unlocked and a humanoid figure lying bandaged on the table, jumps to the obvious and wrong conclusion: that Moreau vivisects men into beasts, and that he is next.
He flees and finds the colony of Beast Folk, led by a creature called the Sayer of the Law, who makes him recite the Law, a litany of prohibitions against bestial behaviour mixed with praise of Moreau. Only when cornered does Prendick learn the truth. The Beast Folk were never men. They were animals, and Moreau has spent eleven years trying to turn one of them completely into a human being.
The main characters
Edward Prendick is the narrator and the reader's stand in. He is scientifically trained enough to understand what Moreau is doing and decent enough to be sickened by it, but he is also a castaway with nowhere to go. His moral position erodes as the months pass.
Doctor Moreau is the mad scientist of the title, though he never behaves like a raving one. He is calm, articulate and completely untroubled. He regards the pain he inflicts as insignificant, an unavoidable side effect of the work. He argues that pain is an animal instinct which a truly human being would not feel, and cuts his own thigh with a penknife without reacting, to prove it.
Montgomery is Moreau's assistant, a weaker and more sympathetic man, closer to the Beast Folk than he would like to admit.
The Beast Folk include the Ape-Man, the Sloth-Man, M'ling, the Sayer of the Law, the Leopard-Man and the Hyena-Swine. Moreau's complaint about them is that they keep reverting to their animal form and behaviour.
The themes
Pain and cruelty sit at the centre. The novel landed in the middle of Victorian argument about vivisection, and Moreau's indifference to suffering is the engine of the plot. Alongside that run moral responsibility, human identity, human interference with nature, and the effects of trauma on the person who witnesses it.
The Law is the sharpest idea in the book. A set of commandments, repeated aloud, propping up praise for a creator who made his creatures through agony. It works until it does not. The Leopard-Man breaks the prohibition on tasting blood, and the whole arrangement begins to come apart. Prendick shoots him to spare him further sessions in the laboratory, which enrages Moreau and marks the point where Prendick stops being a bystander.
The final act (contains spoilers)
Prendick grows used to the Beast Folk over time, which is its own quiet horror. Then the half-finished puma woman tears free of her restraints and escapes the laboratory. Moreau goes after her, and the two of them end up fighting each other. The collision the novel has been building towards is between the maker and the thing he was making.
Why it still matters
It remains one of Wells's best known books and a foundation stone of early science fiction. It contains the earliest version of the "uplift" idea, where a more advanced race intervenes in another species' evolution to raise its intelligence, a motif the genre has used ever since. It has been adapted for film and other media many times. More than a century on, the central question has not aged at all. Someone can do this. Who decides whether they should?
